IJCCI: The Seymour test: Powerful ideas in early childhood education

In this article, Marina Bers describes her introduction to Seymour Papert and what she learned from his mentorship.

“…Seymour understood the importance of ‘objects to think with’. These objects can help us make ideas concrete, tangible and sharable. They also empower us to have new ideas or to see old ideas in new ways. Objects can exist on the digital screen or on the physical world. The LOGO turtle was both a virtual cursor and a floor-based robot.”

Marina goes on to describe how Seymour Papert guided her efforts in her design of the programming environments KIBO and ScratchJr. When programming KIBO, she designed it to help children code in a playful way so they could engage in computational thinking and encounter powerful ideas. Marina states that she kept asking herself,
“will these tools pass “The Seymour test”?